Abstract Book of the 9th International Academic Conference on Education
Year: 2025
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Development and Validation of a Survey to Define The Model of Epistemological Beliefs
Özden Şengül
ABSTRACT:
Teachers need to develop advanced general epistemological beliefs in order to maintain their scientific knowledge and reflect their epistemological beliefs into practice. It has been necessary to examine how domain-general and domain-specific beliefs interact with each other. This study conducted the development of a tool to provide a valid and reliable measure of the harmonization and association of science teachers’ domain-general and domain-specific epistemological beliefs. A total of 354 physics teachers (170 male, 184 female) with teaching experiences of 5-30 years participated in the study from Istanbul, Turkey. General epistemological belief questionnaire and a domain-specific epistemological belief questionnaire were utilized to modify previous surveys on epistemological beliefs. For data analysis, reliability and validity analysis were conducted and Cronbach Alpha was found as over 0.70 for all surveys. Principal Factor Analysis was conducted and factor loadings for survey ranged between 0.467 and 0.776. Test for exact fit of the model showed that χ2 /df =46.55 with p<.001. There was no significant relationship between teachers’ gender and dimensions of epistemological beliefs as domain-general, domain-specific beliefs and beliefs about teaching and learning. The results also showed that physics teachers’ domain general beliefs were significantly related to scientific epistemological beliefs (with an estimate of r=0.48 with p< .001) and teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning was positively correlated with domain-general beliefs (with an estimate of r=0.28 with p< .001) and scientific epistemological beliefs (with an estimate of r=0.24 with p< .001). More further results will be provided with the model to discuss further implementations.
Keywords: epistemology, beliefs, teaching, learning, teacher education